Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Tony Abbott says Victoria’s coronavirus lockdown is the most severe tried in the world outside Wuhan. Is he correct? – ABC News

Mr Abbott’s claim is wrong.

Many governments adopted individual policies similar to Victoria’s such as curfews and stay-home orders.

Some rules were even stricter. For example, Spain and Argentina banned outdoor exercise entirely while Israel limited walks to within 100 metres of home.

Meanwhile, Chile allowed only twice-weekly shop visits, and both South Africa and India banned the sale of alcohol.

And whereas New Zealand prohibited takeaway food and drinks, Victorians could at least still visit their local cafe to pick up a coffee.

Source: Tony Abbott says Victoria’s coronavirus lockdown is the most severe tried in the world outside Wuhan. Is he correct? – ABC News

LA County Nears Goal Of Recruiting 17k Election Workers, And Young People Are Stepping Up

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L.A. County vote center worker Ryan Richard in Palmdale, CA on May 3, 2020. Coronavirus precautions were in place for in-person voting during the special election for California’s 25th District congressional race.

As the largest voting jurisdiction in the country, Los Angeles County needs an army of election workers to run voting sites and process ballots for 5.4 million registered voters.

For the general election, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder’s Office estimates it will enlist 16,700 workers, mostly to operate vote centers during the 11-day period when Angelenos can cast a ballot in-person. The first centers will begin to open Oct. 24, but the majority will be available during the following weekend, through Election Day.

As of last week, the county had recruited roughly 15,000 election workers. “Those [people] have applied … have engaged in training, have been contacted to engage in training, and have been provided training options,” said L.A. County Registrar-Recorder spokesman Mike Sanchez. The goal is to finish the hiring process by Oct. 16, he added. “We are extremely grateful for the strong community response.”

Poll workers in L.A. County receive a stipend of $100 per day and $80 for mandatory training days.

There’s been a surge of interest this year in the usually un-sexy job of election administration. The spectre of a contagious virus, protests for racial justice and a tumultuous 2020 campaign season inspired many civicminded groups to launch efforts to draft young people to become poll workers.

(Younger folks are less vulnerable to COVID-19 than the older cohort who generally make up the majority of staff at polling places nationwide. But in L.A. County there has recently been an uptick in deaths and hospitalizations among young adults in their 20s.)

Laura Mueller-Soppart says she founded her organization, Work The Polls, to galvanize people in their 20s and 30s after her own frustrating experience in the New York primary, which was rife with technical problems and long lines.

“We’re in a very precarious situation in terms of how we administer our elections this year,” Muller-Soppart said. “The goal is to diversify the poll worker corps, so the burden doesn’t just sit on those over-60 like it usually does.”

With that in mind, L.A. County has focused more of its recruiting efforts on local college campuses, said L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn.

“We are making a much more concerted effort this year to recruit young people to be election workers, and it is paying off,” Hahn said. “We wanted to recruit 3,500 college students and we have already far surpassed that goal with 4,500 applications coming in from local students so far.”

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L.A. County vote center lead Steven Toro sanitizes pens to keep voters safe in Palmdale, CA on Sunday May 3, 2020. (Libby Denkmann for LAist)

Another major pipeline for election workers? County employees who will be on the clock.

[If you prefer to vote by mail, every registered voter in California should get a ballot in their mailbox starting the week of Oct. 5. Learn more through our Voter Game Plan.]

In August, Los Angeles County Supervisors took an emergency step to ensure vote centers would have the necessary staffing. They voted to invoke the “Disaster Service Worker” program, which lets the county reassign its employees to different jobs in extreme situations such as an earthquake — or a global pandemic.

The plan includes “mandatory thresholds for each [county] department in order to fill all crucial positions,” said Lisa Garrett, Director of Personnel for L.A. County.

The county is in the process of identifying 7,400 employees who will serve as vote center staff or reservists.

The emergency measures mean they’ll be paid differently, too. In the past, county workers who chose to become election workers were paid their usual salary for the day, plus the stipend for vote center staff.

This year, as Disaster Service Workers, county employees won’t receive the stipend. Instead, many will be eligible for overtime pay (usually time-and-a-half) for working extra hours on top of their normal schedules — which is typical of long shifts at vote centers that can range from 12-to-16 hours on Election Day.

“County departments will pay the regular salaries of their employees assigned as [Disaster Service Workers] during the election and all overtime costs will be funded by the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk,” Garrett said. “The County continues to pursue additional funding and reimbursement sources for this assignment.”

That will include at least some CARES Act money to help local governments hold elections under threat from the coronavirus. Earlier this month, the Secretary of State awarded L.A. County $16 million in federal grant funding for election administration.

DISAPPOINTED VOLUNTEERS

If you’re still waiting to hear back about your L.A. County poll worker application, you’re not alone, according to Mueller-Soppart of Work the Polls. She says the majority of people who pledged to become election workers here through her organization haven’t heard back from L.A. County.

A possible bottleneck: the county implemented a new data management system to track poll worker applications, and that included introducing a new online portal for applications on Sept. 3.

Mueller-Soppart says the new system went into effect after a flood of applications came in from Work the Polls and other groups, which were active over the summer. She only became aware of the new portal, Mueller Soppart said, after several of her pledged workers grew concerned about a lack of response to their applications and called the county.

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Members of the media got a preview of the Dodger Stadium vote center, opening up to the general public Oct. 30, 2020. (Libby Denkmann for LAist)

“We learned that because of that shift, any new applications that did not already receive a login would have to reapply [through the new portal],” Mueller-Soppart said. “And when asked if there was going to be any kind of notification, or any kind of heads-up, the county let our pledges know that L.A. County would not be letting anybody know.”

The Registrar-Recorder’s office acknowledged there are cases where would-be poll workers are being asked to re-apply, but said that’s generally because third party applications didn’t have enough of the information the county needed for recruitment and placement.

“As we work through those applications requiring more information — or as individuals reach out to us for follow-up — we are filling those data gaps,” Sanchez said. “In some cases, we are encouraging interested workers to complete the data on our new portal to have a complete record.”

Mueller-Soppart says she doesn’t want young people trying to get involved in civic life for the first time to be discouraged.

“We have gotten nothing but excitement back from L.A. County and from every county’s office across the country,” Mueller-Soppart said. “I really encourage everyone to meet their county halfway and just get [the application] done.”

Battered, bloodshot Boris is no longer the star of his own show | John Crace

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Keir Starmer barely has to get out of second gear to win PMQs now. It must be driving Johnson mad

Like most narcissists, Boris Johnson is unable to conceive of other people having an independent existence. Rather, they are mere satellites orbiting his ego. Mere objects whose only function is to do his bidding. And to be fair, it’s a world view that has served him well enough up to now as he’s cruised his way, with a flamboyant mixture of broken promises, outright lies and back-stabbing, to his life’s goal of becoming prime minister. Family, friends and colleagues that have been trampled upon along the way are just collateral damage.

But there are growing signs that many people are increasingly deciding that enough is enough. Tory backbenchers have got fed up with being left out in the cold from the government’s coronavirus legislation and the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, made no attempt to disguise his anger on Wednesday at the way parliament had been sidelined. But the person who most gets under Boris’s skin is Keir Starmer. Because more than six months in, he has yet to get the better of the Labour leader.

Continue reading…

Trump Took Credit for Making Insulin “So Cheap It’s Like Water.” Tell That to People Paying for It.

Spin and hot air – insulin still priced too high.

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There was a key moment that you might have missed in Tuesday’s presidential debate. It happened early on, before President Trump told a neofascist militia to “stand by,” invented an endorsement from an Oregon sheriff, and trampled on the memory of Joe Biden’s dead son. Trump, after being criticized by Biden for his ongoing efforts to blow up the Affordable Care Act, tried to change the subject by talking about all the work he’s doing to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

“I’ll give you an example,” Trump said. “Insulin—it was destroying families, destroying people, the cost. I’m getting it for so cheap it’s like water, you want to know the truth. So cheap.”

So cheap it’s like water.

I did a double take when I heard this, because insulin is expensive as hell, and no, the president hasn’t fixed that. How expensive? “In reality, insulin still retails for roughly $300 a vial,” wrote Nicholas Florko at Stat News. “Most patients with diabetes need two to three vials per month, and some can require much more.” 

When I sent a tweet about this, I was flooded with responses from people sharing their own stories of how much they pay for insulin and other diabetes medication, sometimes attaching literal receipts. People pay more just to stay alive than the president paid in taxes in 2017:

With insurance, I had to pay $600 for a vial. I had to switch to Walmart brand insulin and even then, it’s WAY more expensive than water.

— Queen Phoenix (@QPhoenix113) September 30, 2020

My 14 year old daughter has had T1 since she was 2. This is what it costs to keep her alive for one month pic.twitter.com/kBoiEdxpJS

— TrailerParkTrophyWife (@Jerseyatheart1) September 30, 2020

I buy insulin for two people in my family. $2,500 per quarter. At some point insurance kicks in but I hit $11,500 max OOP about 8 months into my year. And I have pretty good corporate insurance

— Noman (@itnor1) September 30, 2020

The sticker price for a three-month supply of the insulin I take is over $7500. That has not changed under Trump. pic.twitter.com/dpmrSsmYxq

— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) September 30, 2020

I’m still laughing over that one. I pay $2.99 for a case of water and my insulin pens cost $500 dollars a month and that’s just for mine my husband has his insulin also costs as much as mine.

— Rosalinda Cervantes (@madeusk2409) September 30, 2020

The cost of insulin, which people with type-1 diabetes need to inject regularly, tripled between 2009 and 2017 because of predatory pricing decisions by drug companies. That had terrible health and financial consequences on the people who rely on the medication to live. A study last year found that a full quarter of type-1 diabetes patients were rationing their insulin because they couldn’t afford it. What made the price-gouging all the more glaring was the origin story of the medication; its inventors famously refused to even put their names on it, believing that it belonged to the whole world and should be, well, almost as cheap as water.

Trump, Wallace noted in his preceding question, has “never come up with a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacare” despite years of promising to improve the American health care system. Instead he has issued a stream of executive orders designed to give the appearance of tackling problems like prescription drug prices—most notably, insulin.

The administration made headlines in March when it announced plans to cap the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for seniors—but as Stat News noted, that discount (which is hardly as cheap as water) was limited to “a fraction of seniors enrolled in certain pricey private insurance plans.” And it would have no impact on the young people without insurance who had turned to rationing.

Likewise, when Trump signed four executive orders on prescription drug prices in July, which he said would lower the cost of insulin from “big dollars to virtual pennies,” the Washington Post reported that it was mostly posturing:

However, the moves are largely symbolic because the orders are unlikely to take effect anytime soon, if they do so at all, because the power to implement drug pricing policy through executive order is limited. Voters will not see an impact before the November elections, and the drug industry is sure to challenge them in court.

And an analysis from the independent fact-checking site Politifact rated the president’s claim that insulin costs had been seriously cut “mostly false,” and emphasized just how limited his purportedly sweeping reforms were. “A recent executive order on insulin would touch fewer than 20% of clinics through a program that provides 10% or less of all prescription drugs.”

In practice, according to Kaiser Health News, the executive orders he’s signed are “far from being implemented” and are not likely to “pass along drug-pricing discounts to a majority of Americans.”

To the extent that insulin costs have gone down in recent months for a lot of people, it’s because companies simply decided to lower them during the pandemic—a good public relations move, but not a substitute for long-term policy.

Trump, who also boasted about lowering drug prices during his Republican National Convention speech, seems like he’s sticking to this talking point. But for everything else that happened on Tuesday, this might be the kind of subtle moment that voters remember—Biden or outside groups might remind them—because the people Trump is messaging to are the ones best equipped to call his bluff. You can get away with lying about things that are abstract. Declare often enough that Antifa is invading the suburbs and people might believe it. Spin enough stories about ballots ending up in rivers (what was that, anyway?) and a kernel of doubt might form. But it’s another thing to lie about something so intrinsic to people’s lives—a medication that people pay for every month so they don’t die. Either you’ve delivered insulin for “virtual pennies” or you haven’t.

Early results promising for RNA COVID vaccine in older adults

The authors caution that, without more inclusion of older adults, any potential COVID-19 vaccine’s effectiveness, use, and adverse effects may not be fully realized or understood.

“Some have argued that only vaccination of younger populations is needed to achieve herd immunity (67% level of immunity), and therefore, vaccination of older adults is not essential,” the authors write. “However, the high level of immunity required, coupled with the fact that many settings (eg, nursing homes) are comprised nearly exclusively of older adults, highlights the imperative for their inclusion in COVID-19 vaccine trials.”

Older man getting vaccinated
Lianna Matt McLernon | News Writer | CIDRAP News
Sep 30, 2020

The study is one of only a few showing preliminary data in older populations.